


Feathers

by nookienostradamus



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Ficlet/Drabble, Lots of Angst, Masturbation, Other, Sad!John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:04:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/828875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nookienostradamus/pseuds/nookienostradamus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson is a haunted man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feathers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [professorfangirl (lizeckhart)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/gifts).



> I can't believe I suckered myself into a songfic, but...  
> Neil Young's "Birds" came up on my playlist, and this happened.
> 
> "When you see me fly away without you/  
> Shadow on the things you know/  
> Feathers fall around you/  
> And show you the way to go"
> 
> For professorfangirl, because she (sort of) asked.

John Watson is a haunted man.

Not that he would ever acknowledge it, and certainly not in those terms.

And it isn’t as though he feels the need to prove his stoicism; it is ineluctable as his own body, and has been since well before his army days.

Constant John.

Unflappable John.

Dedicated John.

Stoic John.

This he continues to present, as if he does not think of there being a “before” and an “after,” or a difference between the two. On the occasional lucky evening, he manages to believe it.

So it is underneath the level of his notice that the components of his life after Sherlock begin to take on a shine of the portentous. Blocks of time and motions through them together become a blue and foggy place where he can sink a hand below the surface and lose awareness of the appendage altogether at almost the same time that he loses sight of it.

If the “OPEN” sign in the window at Angelo’s is flickering, which letter is weakest? If it is the “O,” the chips of the day fall in unrecognizable patterns when set beside a day in which the “N” falters. Without realizing it, John spends a half-hour examining the first letters in each line of text down the left-hand column of his blog, rearranging. Nonsense coded as more nonsense.

That he does not see this as a problem of mind is because the concept of “mind” is wrapped entirely in Sherlock. It wears his clothes, it has his voice. The logical conclusion being that if Sherlock is gone, then mind is an encumbrance he need not worry about.

Directed self-sufficiency. Functionality as usual. These are the things at which John excels.

The ugliest and most banal offshoot of Sherlock’s absence is that John becomes privy to a sliver of the boredom that plagued his friend. Sherlock Holmes was the only person John ever knew to leave a wake, in both the nautical and funereal sense. John hasn’t had to potter about with the dustbin, sweeping up shards behind that presence, after hammer-blows to theories, feelings, lives.

He is, of course, unaware that he trails his own pieces, and that they are legion.

Instead, he laughs at circumstance, which is what he has always done. One evening he falls asleep seated, head-down on the cluttered kitchen table in 221B, a nearly full bottle of lager in one hand. The edge of an open petri dish he swore he did not feel leaves a purple semicircle in his cheek, whose pain fades to an itch. John scratches it, chuckling, wishing without knowing he is wishing for an impossibility.

Pain does not behave that way. John itches superficially, and burns below.

On the last day that he stays in the flat on Baker Street, he lays in his own room, in his own bed, as always. He has not ventured into Sherlock’s room, though the door is open and has never been shut--by Mrs. Hudson or anyone else.

John dreams, or thinks he dreams, of standing at the doorway and looking into that room. He catalogues everything there, but remembers inconsequential things. A nub of thickened lacquer at the top of the wardrobe. Two pairs of shoes, the heels aligned, but one pair with the laces tied and the other pair untied and tucked into the gusset.

All of it creates a picture he can’t decipher, a critical mass of signs that shudders on the edge of being clutter and spills over into emotion.

John wakes, or wakes from his dream-state, having watched a single tuft of down that has worked free from Sherlock’s feather pillow spin in a breeze he cannot see and drift to the floor. And suddenly his lungs are clotted, he wheezes through a soft thickness that is all filling and no substance.

His panicked heartbeat slams against his eyes from the inside out, pummels through the hardness he finds between his legs and the palm he uses to touch it.

There were no signs. Sherlock’s presence, and his tolerance, were the signals, and John had missed all of them. Stupid, mindless creature! Walking a path of the same shape without recognizing that the scenery is inverted around him, roots bleeding upward from trees stuck head-down.

He tears up a handful of the bedsheets, bites hard at his knuckles through the cloth.

Perhaps John comes.

It is irrelevant. He weeps--that is flood enough and more.

Behind his closed eyes, he does not see blood on pavement. It is there when he opens them.

But his trail is already laid, away from the blood with calm, certain steps. If ever a breath--or the sweep of a coat, say--should disturb the tiny down fluff on the floor near Sherlock’s empty shoes, would he turn?


End file.
